Food

Food should be good for you. But some foods aren’t. Pesticides are sprayed on millions of acres every year and some of them end up on your food. Our broken farm subsidy system encourages over production of the wrong food. EWG is pushing for better policy and more sustainable ways of farming that produce healthy food in a healthy environment.

Now that McDonald’s Hummerhappy mealpromo is officially over and the marketing experts who conceived it are out looking for new jobs, their successors should be hard at work searching for a toy that isn’t such a PR nightmare. The answer seems pretty obvious to Nick from TriplePundit and Al from CityHippy--Hybrid Cars.

On McDonald’s CSR blog, Vice President Bob Langert has defended the company’s Hummer Happy Meal promotion by dismissing the effect that advertising has on children: "… I polled my staff who have or had children. One of them said her children enjoy the little Hummer replicas as toys, just as many kids like toy trucks, regardless of make or model. She drives a MiniCooper, walks with her children to get groceries, bicycles with them on weekends, etc. Another said her grandchildren absolutely love the toy Hummers--that they're fun."

Check out this FDA Centennial Anthem, written in honor of the big milestone: "One century past, a people's hope fulfilled By an act conceived for safe medicine and food Protecting rights that our founding fathers willed To life and liberty, to happiness pursued."

Yes, if major food processors have their way in the Senate. According to Beyond Pesticides and the Organic Consumers Association, if the food processors get their amendment through the Senate this week, then the hard-won national organic standards, just passed in 2002, will be weakened.

Summary — PCBs in farmed salmon

In the first-ever tests of perchlorate in supermarket produce, 18 percent of lettuce samples contained detectable levels of perchlorate, and an average serving of these contaminated samples contained 4 times more than the EPA says is safe in drinking water. EWG estimates that by eating lettuce, 1.6 million American women of childbearing age are exposed daily during the winter months to more perchlorate than the EPA’s recommended safe dose. EWG's findings of perchlorate in retail produce confirm previous tests on greenhouse-grown lettuce seedlings by the EPA and field-grown vegetables by a San Bernardino, Calif. farm whose irrigation water supplies were contaminated by defense contractor Lockheed Martin's abandoned rocket-testing facility.

On January 12, 2001, government health officials issued new advisories warning women to limit fish consumption during pregnancy to avoid exposing their unborn children to unsafe levels of methylmercury. Methylmercury can cross the placenta and cause learning deficits and developmental delays in children who are exposed even to relatively low levels in the womb. The principal exposure route for the fetus is fish consumption by the mother.

The watchdog group that forced John Stossel's on-air apology for an erroneous story on organic food today asked ABC News to make good on a promise to halt circulation of tapes and transcripts of the show. Read More

The watchdog group that forced ABC News to admit it had fabricated laboratory tests for a story attacking organic food has called correspondent John's Stossel's on-air apology "an insult to the ABC News audience, the organic food industry, and to organic food consumers everywhere."

Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook demanded that ABC News President David Westin fire reporter John Stossel for fabricating a network-sponsored laboratory study and repeatedly broadcasting the nonexistent results in a story attacking the safety of organic food.

Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Organic Trade Association (OTA) will release new evidence on Thursday that ABC Correspondent John Stossel knew himself months before his story ran that he lacked scientific proof when he claimed on ABC's 20/20 (2/4/00) that organic food "can kill you."

Laboratory tests of apples grown in Washington State and purchased in Seattle supermarkets over the past five months found widespread insecticide contamination. Eight percent of apple samples had unsafe levels of a bug killer abruptly banned for use on apples and other foods in August, 1999 by federal authorities because of nervous system risks to children.

Everyone knows that women eat – and often crave – different foods when they’re pregnant. But an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of government data shows that some of the things they eat more of give their babies an extra dose of toxic pollutants at the most delicate stage of life.

n a little-noticed decision earlier this year, the EPA’s top scientific committee on children’s health declared that protections against the toxic weed killer atrazine in food and water should not be considered safe for infants and children. According to the Office of Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee:

Ten years after the American public demanded that the EPA ban the cancer-causing pesticide Alar, children are no better protected from pesticides in the nation’s food supply. Multiple pesticides known or suspected to cause brain and nervous system damage, cancer, disruption of the endocrine and immune systems, and a host of other toxic effects are ubiquitous in foods children commonly consume at levels that present serious health risks.

To determine the extent of pesticide contamination of baby food, we tested eight foods (applesauce, garden vegetables or pea and carrot blend, green beans, peaches, pears, plums, squash and sweet potatoes) made by the three major baby food producers that account for 96 percent of all baby food sales -- Gerber, Heinz, and Beech-Nut. All samples were purchased at retail from grocery stores in three major metropolitan areas; Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco. They were tested for pesticides using the Food and Drug Administration's standard pesticide analytical methods.

Most people believe that the produce they buy meets pesticide safety standards. But as this study shows, fruits and vegetables with illegal pesticides end up on grocery shelves, in kitchens, and in lunchboxes throughout the country every day. Forbidden Fruit analyzes 14,923 computerized records from the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) routine pesticide monitoring program for the fiscal years 1992 and 1993. We focused our investigation on 42 fruits and vegetables that respectively comprise 96 and 83 percent of domestic fruit and vegetable consumption.